[Update] – Schedule of presentations has been posted. My session is from 8:30 – 9:30am and bio page is here.

On Dec. 5, the SharePoint Saturday for DC (#SPSDC) event will be hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center. The call for speakers were for non SharePoint 2010 content and specifically, for solutions that addressed relevant business needs for the Washington, DC area. In other words (more or less), this means “Who wants to talk about solutions useful for the Government?” I was interested and could have repeated one of my previous SharePoint presentations about reporting airplane incident/accident events within SharePoint or about categorizing your data to plan for various degrees of high availability in SharePoint. Both are certainly relevant to the government. However, after Dux Raymond Sy checked out the jPoint project, he encouraged me to submit a speaker form to discuss it. It is not directly related to the government, per se, but it will allow both the public and private sectors to improve the effectiveness of their SharePoint deployments. Here is the list of speakers (I am at the bottom).

Thus, I made the title of my presentation “jPoint: A jQuery Based Library for creating Web 2.0 Apps in SharePoint”. I have the description of the talk at the bottom of this post. At the presentation, I hope that some of the jPoint contributors, like Ken, Samir, and Luke, will be present so you can meet some of the incredible talent that is helping to create a client side API in JavaScript for SharePoint and jump starting the effort to build solutions on top of the API – see the neat examples at http://sharejPoint.com/examples. Now on to promoting the good causes.

Good Cause #1

SharePoint Saturday will be promoting a Clothing Drive. Warm clothes will be especially helpful for the needy in the coming Winter months. I love when hard work can be directed towards a good cause, such as national safety, the disadvantaged, and of course, charity. Below is an excerpt from http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/dc/default.aspx.

#SPSDC Clothing Drive

Thursday, October 29, 2009

If you are planning to attend SharePoint Saturday DC on December 5, 2009, make sure you bring clothing that are new or in good condition to be donated to local charities like Salvation Army.

Clothing-donation needs include: school clothes, coats and other cold-weather accessories, professional clothing for employment interviews, and shoes, which wear out quickly and must be replaced often, especially among growing children.

Clothing donations to qualified charitable organizations are tax deductible. For tax deduction purposes, The Salvation Army publish guidelines for the valuation of donated items, including clothing and shoes.

Let’s show the true meaning of connecting and collaborating. As Karuana Gatimu (one of the great SharePoint community leaders today) says “Sharing is the Point!”

Good Cause #2

The second good cause I will be promoting is jPoint. Why? It is simple. It is free and saves time. It is arguably not as important as the clothing drive, in the short term. But bear with me. I have a long term vision in mind. jPoint is a free, open source project that will make developers lives easier and give SharePoint site administrators the ability to deploy customizations and “Web 2.0” mashups or composite applications without having to write code or touch the server. I want to do my part in the community to create and spread the adoption of cost saving, valued added tools that increase the end user experience. Increasing the end user experience will increase adoption and that will not only set the stage for increasing user productivity, but should also increase the efficiency of business processes and make everyone better off. What do you think? Checkout my talk at SharePoint Saturday or get involved with the project at http://jPoint.codeplex.com. And similar to Kauruana’s quote above, jPoint’s motto is: “Share jPoint. It’s open source.”

Description of the SharePoint Saturday presentation – “jPoint: A jQuery Based Library for creating Web 2.0 Apps in SharePoint”

Have you ever wanted to hide certain fields in a SharePoint list form that were “For Office Use Only?” Or to create a chat/IM tool or AJAX enable a list, but did not have rights to deploy a custom solution on the server? Or to use drag and drop functionality on a SharePoint page? Many developers have turned to jQuery client-side scripts to solve these issues. Many solutions take to much time to get off the ground and they break when used in other browsers. And what about your current client-side scripts when you upgrade to SharePoint 2010? Will they work? These problems are being solved by the FREE open source community project called jPoint. It is hosted on codeplex at http://jPoint.codeplex.com. jPoint is a data access layer for SharePoint to make it easier for developers to work with form fields and communicate with the SharePoint web services. It also provides a deployment framework so developers can create jPart “plugins” that site Administrators can drop on their pages to create Web 2.0 mashups.

This presentation will comprise of three segments:

1: Demo of a real life Web 2.0 App in SharePoint

2: Explanation of jParts and how Site Admins can configure them

3: Deep dive into jPoint library and API (time permitting)

This session level is ranked intermediate and for Special Interest. Leave me a comment if you are interested in the demo videos or any post-presentation material. Thanks.

This video says it is 9:33 long, but the intro and demo really only lasts until 5:59. The rest of the video is a silent intro that I added in order to re-upload the video with enough of a checksum difference for YouYube not to reject it as a duplicate. The first video that was created did not have the correct zoom points at places. The silent part which is a couple of minutes at the end is not necessarily a waste of time. It shows the jPInspector example which shows the power of jPoint.Form. This acts as a preview of the next video. So, how did I do for my first video screencast? What can I do to improve the next one?